Abstract
As part of a broader ‘Localism’ agenda, the Coalition government elected in the UK in May 2010 was committed to introducing a new land-use planning system built mainly from the ‘bottom’ through the promotion of forms of community-led plans. Its approach was built heavily on the experience of parish and town plans in rural communities across England. This paper provides a background to, and a review of, key issues from the experience to date of rural community-led plans. It highlights challenges and opportunities for adapting these into a system based on the government's developing approaches to localism and collaborative planning.
Notes
1. This paper was drafted in July 2010, at a time when Coalition policy was changing rapidly. By the time it is published, further detail on approaches to localism, and so forth, may be known, although they are unlikely to change the main points made in the paper.
2. For example the Sciencewise programme initiated by the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills.
3. Notably the Environment Agency's Working with Others: Building Trust with Communities programme.
4. ‘NIMBY’—Not In My Backyard, an acronym for those who resist any development anywhere near them.
5. Echoes of the decentralization movement of the late 1980s, see The Politics of Decentralisation (Burns et al., Citation1994).